Tips, web design book reviews, resources and observations for teaching and learning web development.
The mobile landscape: 10 things media pros should know at contentious is a good look at the current mobile situation for marketers.
Were you watching the Oscars and tweeting along? I was and it made the experience more fun (and funny). I wasn’t the only one: And the Winner of the Academy Award Goes to . . . Real Time Social Streams.
The Mary Sue is a new site that defines itself as a guide to girl geek culture. The people doing the writing are women, which is a hopeful sign.
A few HTML5 questions that need answering is from Christian Heilmann.
Did you know Smashing Magazine has a newsletter? I just learned about it and think it might be pretty good. You might want to check it out, too.
A nice new WordPress plugin from doodlebee, aka @brassblogs, for those of you who set up WordPress sites for others and want to leave them some hints and reminders is Back End Instructions. Here’s some of the description of how it works.
Using WordPress’ default posting capabilities, mixed in with some custom post types and meta fields (and a little sprinkle of magic fairy dust and a lot of prayers), you can easily create and manage instructions for each page of the back-end of your client’s site. Simply create a post, associate the post with a page in the back-end, add in your content, and voilà: a small button appears at the top of the page that expands with jQuery to show a list of “instructables” (post title links) associated with that page.
Are you watching the new series The Chicago Code? This week the leading tip on solving a crime came from a tweeting teen. danah boyd talks about tweeting teens in Tweeting Teens can Handle Public Life with her usual research-based authority.
If you’ve been watching events unfolding in Egypt on Twitter you are aware of what Andy Carvin from NPR has been doing in terms of collecting and broadcasting tweets. Here’s a good interview with him from My Heart’s in Accra: Interview with Andy Carvin on curating Twitter to watch Tunisia, Egypt.
“The phrase “programmatically determined” features prominently in six of the 61 WCAG 2.0 Success Criteria.” In Programatically Determined at Accessible Culture, you can find out what it’s all about. Here’s a key bit.
When content is properly marked up in HTML, its semantic structure and relationships are in the markup itself. That is, they can be programmatically determined. Because this information is in the code, as it were, supporting technologies can programmatically retrieve it and present it to users in different ways. The information can be
transformed…into different sensory formats (e.g., visual, auditory) or styles of presentation needed by individual users.This is a key aspect of accessible web content and a core concept in WCAG 2.0.Such information can then be passed along by the browser to whatever other device or software is able to make use of it. Screen readers, voice recognition software, alternative input devices, etc., can tell what each bit of content is and allow users to interact with them accordingly.
Read the comments, too. They are valuable.
HTML5 Accessibility Challenges by Steve Faulkner is a quick summary of some of the issues.
One of my favorite responses when asked about Twitter is, “You don’t get it until you get it.”
What I mean is that hearing about Twitter makes people scoff and dismiss it. Seeing the public timeline makes people say things about wasting time and having better things to do. I was one of the scoffers at first.
Then I got it.
The reasons I got it are years in the past. I suspect that some new people are getting it in the last few days because of events in Egypt. It’s hard to ignore how significant even 140 characters of open communication can be when freedom and self-determination are at stake.
Those of you who are fans of Gray’s Anatomy saw the Chief get it last night. Dr. Bailey was tweeting from the operating room, and the Chief didn’t like it.
Until he did.
It was a classic conversion to getting Twitter.
If you didn’t see it last night, watch it free on ABC. If you ever need an example of why people think Twitter is important, this episode of Gray’s Anatomy is a perfect teaching tool. There’s a short clip about Dr. Bailey tweeting, but it doesn’t go on long enough for you to see the Chief finally seeing the value of social media. If you run across a clip that goes on for another minute or so past what this clip shows, please share a link to it in the comments.
Here’s what you see in an email when someone follows you on Quora.
Remember when Twitter used to send useless emails like this – you had to click through to find out more about the person following you? A name and nothing from the profile or anything to indicate interests?
Well, Twitter made progress. A Twitter email telling you that someone is following you contains all sorts of helpful information that makes it easy to decide whether you want to follow the person before you click through. Here’s an example of what you get from Twitter.
Helpful, right? I can make a decision about this individual immediately. If I want to follow, I can click on over to Twitter. If I don’t, I can just delete the email.
I wish Quora made it that easy. Quora needs to learn from Twitter.
Why Use Classes or IDs on the HTML Element is an excellent post by Chris Coyler.
The Case for the Virtual Classroom is must reading for educators.
Twitter Birds are Liars is an interesting discussion about Twitter by Antonio Lupetti.
Eric Meyer spent the holidays rethinking his CSS Reset. If you use it regularly, go see what he’s done. Reset Revisited.
I’ve written many articles at eHow about Twitter. Since there are still many Twitter newbies out there who don’t understand the basics of how it works, here are some of those eHow articles:
This slidedeck from a talk I did called Twitter for Writers can also give you a few Twitter basics.